How do you decide on the top financial books of all time? You look at the philosophies that helped you create wealth in your life and where they originated.
Sometimes when you read many books (I have read 110), the ideas become jumbled together into one big ball of thoughts and passions. However, it’s good to go back and extract the essential books that were vital to forming your mindset.
Let me be clear; these books helped me the most. Your list will be much different because we all have our journey to follow. Each author, writing style, or book will affect us differently.
With that, let’s jump into the discussion of my Top 15 Financial Books of All-Time.
- Rich Dad, Poor Dad
- Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant
- Rich Dad’s Guide to Investing
- Unfair Advantage
- The Compound Effect
- The 4-Hour Work Week
- The Millionaire Fastlane
- Think & Grow Rich
- The Practice
- Mindset
- How to Make A Living With Your Writing
- Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, Repeat
- The Two-Income Trap
- All Your Worth
- I Will Teach You to be Rich
“Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki is the most incredible financial mindset book of all time. You will most likely find it on most people’s favorites list. Why is it so noteworthy?
Robert Kiyosaki’s ideas on wealth creation are still vastly different from most peoples’ ideas, even 20+ years after release. Mr. Kiyosaki explains the difference between assets and liabilities in the book and calls your house a liability.
He teaches the income statement in detail—how assets grow your income and liabilities add to your expenses. His simplicity gives everyone a chance to understand the content.
“Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant” by Robert Kiyosaki helps us convert our mindset from employee and self-employed to business owner and investor.
It could be a tough pill to swallow because school prepared us to be employees. The transition to thinking like an entrepreneur and investor can take some time.
It took me 20+ books and six months to grow into an entrepreneur slowly. After 18 months of dwelling on this book, it continues to become more significant in my head.
“Rich Dad’s Guide to Investing” by Robert Kiyosaki taught me how to invest from the inside. It also explained that everything in life is an investment. Our college education, marriage, business, job, etc., are investments of time.
When you evaluate your return on investment on your time and money, you can make better choices along the way. Investing from the inside means that you can directly control the outcome of an investment.
This thought process is the difference between owning shares of a real estate investment trust versus your own complement of rental properties. Owning your rental properties allows you to directly adjust different variables to increase your cash flow.
“Unfair Advantage” by Robert Kiyosaki is the advanced version of “Rich Dad, Poor Dad.” Mr. Kiyosaki focuses on topics such as debt, leverage, and education.
You have a massive advantage over the general population when you understand how to use debt to create leverage, produce infinite returns, and minimize taxes.
“The Compound Effect” by Darren Hardy gives us the key to life—compounding. Everything we do in life compounds into something over time. These can be both good and bad habits.
Thus, if you focus on building and keeping good habits, you get massive positive results over time. This book is great for people starting in education, content creation, entrepreneurship, and investing.
I reference this book in my content almost daily because I deeply believe in the concept of compounding. In my first month of dividend investing, I received $0.25 in dividends. Less than three years later, I earned $950. That’s the power of compounding.
“The 4-Hour Work Week” by Timothy Ferriss is all about business automation through technology and out-sourcing. More importantly, it tells us to form the automation mindset well before starting our business.
As we plan to start a business, we should ask ourselves how we can automate the processes. Ultimately, we want to remove ourselves from the company while earning income.
We won’t lock ourselves into a job where we have to show up every day by planning far ahead. We free ourselves to supervise from afar. It’s a life-changing concept.
“The Millionaire Fastlane” by MJ DeMarco is about wealth generators. After reading this book, I use this term consistently because it is a crucial wealth multiplier.
A wealth generator allows you to multiply your wealth much faster than working a job and investing in the stock market. Each wealth generator has a factor that can affect the speed of your wealth creation.
Therefore, generators like websites, e*commerce, and software development rank high on the chart because you can reach far more people over the internet while sleeping.
“Think & Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill was one of my first deep mindset shift books. This book is over 70 years old but as vital as ever.
If you do not have the mindset for wealth, you will never be wealthy. This book gives us actionable steps to envision our path to wealth. We have to say specific affirmations to ourselves daily, among other things.
The author also explains why men tend to become wealthy in their 40s, as they transform their sex drive into a determination to acquire wealth.
“The Practice” by Seth Godin is not a business book per se; however, it is invaluable to anyone traveling a different path. Mr. Godin focuses on content creators in the book, but anyone can use his principles.
The book is vital to anyone who wants to escape the rat race by doing something unique. Starting a business, creating content, investing in real estate, etc., requires thinking differently.
Mr. Godin empowers us to embrace what makes us different and release our talents to the world. When I started releasing books, I would mentally reference this book to maintain a high confidence level.
“Mindset” by Dr. Carol S. Dweck explains the difference between people with a “fixed mindset” and those with a “growth mindset.”
More importantly, it gives actionable steps to convert those with a fixed mindset into a growth mindset. A growth mindset is necessary to get out of the rat race and acquire the wealth we desire.
This book does not focus on wealth, but you can easily see that entrepreneurs, content creators, and investors have growth mindsets.
How to Make A Living With Your Writing
“How to Make a Living With Your Writing” by Joana Penn is one of the first books I read covering branching paths of wealth. Basically, that’s the concept of creating multiple streams of income on top of each other.
While this book focuses on writing, you can use this mentality on anything in life. If you create a garden, you can take pictures and post them on a blog. You can also video the process and post it on YouTube.
If you are using specific gardening tools, you can reference them for affiliate income. Why not host a webinar or create an online course about gardening. All of these branching income streams start with you building a garden.
Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, Repeat
“Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, Repeat” by David Greene is the best real estate investing book —not necessarily because I want to buy undervalued homes and convert them into rentals.
This book covers four critical real estate community members in-depth: real estate agents, general contractors, lenders, and property managers. Even better, Mr. Greene explains how to find the rockstars in the bunch.
If you are thinking of becoming a real estate investor across any specialty, I would recommend this book first.
“The Two-Income Trap” by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi gives us the background on how the middle class is breaking down. To understand finances, we need to know how we got here.
Middle-class families have two parents working yet are more stressed than ever. How is this possible? Because we need incomes to afford a house in the suburbs and middle-class “luxuries” like two cars and after-school activities.
If you plan on becoming wealthy, you need to avoid the trap that society placed upon us. It’s not hard to dodge the trap if you see it coming.
“All Your Worth” by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi is pretty much the companion book to “The Two-Income Trap.” Inside, the ladies give us in-depth guidance on running a budget inside our households.
I especially love the practical nature of this book. The authors recommend things like moving in with your family, renting rooms, or moving into lower-cost neighborhoods. Most books I read never suggest downgrading your lifestyle.
I applaud this mainstream book for giving the guidance of either downgrading your life or working multiple jobs—anything to get out of debt and start building wealth. Good job, Ladies!
“I Will Teach You to be Rich” by Ramit Sethi is the first financial book I read on my journey. Now, with over 110 books under my belt, I can appreciate how much value this book added to my life.
Mr. Sethi’s main takeaway is his humor. I believe “All Your Worth” is better for the standard person, but chances are more people can actually finish this book. It is funny, and he focuses on people’s dreams.
He also teaches people that they can have the things they want by not spending on other things that are not important to them. Suppose they love to eat out, great. However, spend less money on vacations or cars.
By finding what we truly love, we can turn the dial upwards on those items while lowering the dial on things that we find indifferent. This is a huge concept that only he covered across all my reading.
Conclusion. These are fantastic books, and I recommend you read all of them and more. If I were to find a common trend across all of these books, it would be to think differently.
None of these books said to work your job, come home, watch Netflix, and oversleep whenever possible. They alluded to changing your mindset, utilizing your free time, and taking controlled risks.
Wealth is only for those that earn it. No, not from a job, but in your mind. Wealth is a mindset, and these books will help you form the attitude to receive great wealth and keep it.
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